Yes, I’m talking to you, even if you are not a trust fund baby—make that especially if you are not a trust fund baby.

I fear that with all the politicized talk of “Wall Street” and the images that shorthand conjures up in our minds of rapacious bankers and hedge fund managers, we’ve lost track of what the stock market is really all about. A bright young colleague of mine recently said she’d put a little money in the market, had seen it appreciate, but was now feeling a bit guilty about her “blood money” and wanted to cash out.

I fear her disdain is common among millennial progressives, who aren’t likely to break out in celebration if and when the Dow Jones Industrial Average breaks through the 20,000-point milestone it has approached in recent weeks. A Gallup survey last spring reported that only 52 percent of respondents had any money (or a spouse’s money) invested in the stock market, the lowest percentage in several decades.

That’s a shame. The stock market is not only a barometer of our nation’s business ingenuity, it’s also a testament to our shared commitment to a meritocratic form of participatory democracy.

I was reminded of this reading Shoe Dog, Phil Knight’s engaging and refreshingly candid memoir. The Nike founder recounts how financially stressful the company’s early days were, not only at the very beginning but well after it had become apparent that consumers craved Nike’s revolutionary running shoes, and the company was doubling its sales every year. The trouble was, the faster the scrappy Oregon-based competitor to the Adidas behemoth grew, the more nervous its bankers became, having to finance Knight’s vision “on the float,” paying the costs for each new product cycle before their revenue came in to cover the bills. The only answer, which Knight resisted until 1980, was to raise capital by going public; only then was Nike’s long-term success assured.

The stock market enabled the swoosh to eclipse Adidas as an iconic global brand, giving consumers more choice and, yes, making Knight and those who chose to back him billions of dollars in the ensuing decades. And now the stock market is the only reason scrappy Under Armour has itself been able to scale up to take on what it considers—as Knight once considered Adidas—the dominant but unimaginative incumbent in the industry based in Oregon. The market’s wonderfully subversive that way.

It’s become a political trope to talk about the distinction between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” but what a stock market allows is for the most worthy ideas from Main Street to grow and succeed. Think what you will of the bankers on Wall Street, but the market is really about whether we will all be able to benefit from the inspiration of a Phil Knight or a Steve Jobs, and those who will improve upon what they have done.

Knight’s initial hesitation to going public—the significance of the phrase itself is worth appreciating—arose from the same reason the rest of us should appreciate the stock market and seek to preserve its central role in our economy. He understood that once a company trades its shares on the market, it is accountable to the public. In exchange for being able to raise money from perfect strangers like you via your pension fund or 401(k), companies listed on the stock market are forced by landmark New Deal era legislation to embrace a radical degree of transparency, reporting quarterly results and any reverses they suffer along the way. Their managers, meanwhile, become directly subservient to outside shareholders. Knight had no choice but to embrace such transparency—his parents were not in a position to lend him millions of dollars to bankroll his company’s growth.

Which brings us (sorry) to Donald Trump. Our president-elect’s personal story, business practices, and worldview don’t reflect the ethos of the stock market. Indeed, the opaque and dynastically-run Trump Organization is the antithesis of a democratic, publicly-traded company.

It’s a fun mental exercise to imagine Trump having to navigate the challenges of running a publicly-traded company all those years, if he hadn’t been able to take the aristocratic route of being financed by his father, around the same time that Knight was having to access the public market. Imagine Trump having to report each quarter to pesky journalists, analysts, and institutional investors how the company was faring, and why. Imagine him having to file public disclosures about all his vindictive litigation, and having to address pointed questions about why the CEO of a modestly-sized company was flying around in a 757, and appointing relatives to run various divisions, not to mention tarnishing the company’s brand by disparaging Latinos, Muslims, women, and plenty of other Americans.

Who knows, maybe Trump’s company, thus cured of its cult of personality, would have become a more formidable enterprise, one more closely resembling its creator’s hyperbole. Trump himself would have been long deposed, or long-since reformed into a person better qualified to represent and work on behalf of competing stakeholders and interests in a strategic manner—better qualified, that is, to be President of the United States.

Of course the stock market is far from perfect. Capitalism entails risk, and for every windfall pension funds or individual investors reaped investing early in the likes of Microsoft and Nike, plenty of money has been lost backing bad ideas. You’re smiling now if you bought into Facebook when it started trading publicly and frowning if you invested in Twitter. But who’s to know where each will be in five years? And worse than the speculative uncertainty inherent in stock investing is the recurring sense, triggered by accounting and insider trading scandals, that the market may be rigged by people in the know.

Yet for all the scandals that have afflicted Wall Street, our system is far more efficient at funding worthy ideas to spark innovation and create jobs than any secretive and closed Trumpian world ever could be, where equity can only be raised from family, immediate associates, or a bank loan officer. Our system, with its relentless insistence on transparency and disclosure, is also far better at minimizing fraud. The rule of law and a certain level of social cohesion are key prerequisites for a system in which people are willing to fund ventures beyond their immediate circle; it’s no accident the first functional modern stock market was established in the cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant and egalitarian Dutch Republic, as opposed to a more static, dynastic society. And it should be a source of pride to Americans that our stock market remains the envy of the world. It’s easy for less open societies (see China) to open their own stock markets, but these don’t require the same level of transparency of listing companies, or protect the rights of minority shareholders to the degree ours does, which is why the best companies from those countries still yearn to be listed in our stock market.

The stock market shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It’s a shame that progressives don’t balance their justified outrage at some of Wall Street bankers’ excesses with an acknowledgment of the democratic essence of an accessible stock market that allows entrepreneurs and innovators to fund their companies and take on complacent incumbents. Without dynamic equity markets, our economy would be dominated entirely by private companies like the Trump Organization and business tycoons who inherited their dominant position. It’s a shame that President Obama hasn’t felt more comfortable explaining the market’s meritocratic ethos and applauding his own results in tripling the stock market’s value since its recession lows in the early days of his administration. It’s a shame that politicians from both parties spent this entire populist-tinged election cycle bad-mouthing the market, making millions of younger Americans like my colleague feel like they should stay away, or feel guilty if they don’t.

The post Why America Should Be Bullish About Wall Street appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Surprisingly, his answer was all about a Monday Night Football game played less than two weeks after the election. Namely, the first-ever regular season Monday night game played outside the United States, in Mexico City’s iconic Estadio Azteca. The Oakland Raiders beat the Houston Texans before a sellout crowd of nearly 80,000 fans, but what Guajardo found most telling was the moment before the game when the anthems of both countries were played.

Guajardo explained that the NFL hesitated before playing the U.S. anthem in the Azteca for fear of how the crowd might respond, live on ESPN, but at the end of the day the league went ahead. And with the exception of a few scattered boos, the Mexican crowd’s response was gracious and respectful. Guajardo said this was a hopeful moment—that positive attitudes toward people on the other side of the border, often acquired through first-hand experience, can transcend political differences or efforts by demagogues to distort the essential truth of our mutually beneficial North American partnership.

One can only hope. The stark reality is that Donald Trump won the presidency by running against Mexico. For a candidate with a short attention span and malleable policy stances, his views on Mexico throughout the long presidential campaign were remarkably consistent and sustained. Mexican immigrants are rapists who must be deported; the North American Free Trade Agreement is a disaster that must be torn up; U.S. companies opening plants in that country are treasonous; indeed, Mexico is so dodgy, we need to build a massive wall along the 2,000-mile border. And guess who’s going to pay for it?

He’s so glad you asked.

Forgive Mexicans if they end up taking it all a bit personally. Mexico has become a far more accommodating and friendlier neighbor —more of the middle class, democratic, open-to-the-world country Washington always wanted—in the two decades since NAFTA went into effect. But you hardly ever see this acknowledged in the U.S. media, or politics. Instead, in the Trump campaign narrative, Mexico was portrayed as the leading villain standing in the way of making America great again.

One big question is whether Trump really believes his own anti-Mexico vitriol and is determined to act upon it, or whether he simply peddled it as part of a convincing “enraged populist on campaign trail” TV performance. On the other side of the border, a related big question is whether the damage has already been done, whether the mere act of electing such an anti-Mexican president will tarnish the United States in Mexican eyes for a generation to come. Keep in mind there are plenty of populist Mexicans politicians eager to match Trump’s xenophobic nationalism for their own gain, especially as Mexico gears up for its 2018 presidential election.

In the meantime, I take heart at the outbreak of sports diplomacy like the Monday Night Football game.

On the Friday night of election week, the U.S. and Mexican national soccer teams met in Columbus, Ohio for a World Cup qualifying match. This has become one of the most heated regional rivalries in the world’s leading sport, and a World Cup qualifier doesn’t require a seismic political event to ratchet up the level of intensity.

Still, on this occasion it was for the American sportsmen to worry that politics (and Trumpian-style invective about our southern neighbor) might rear their ugly head in a U.S.-Mexico showdown coming three days after the election. Michael Bradley, the U.S. captain, eloquently said before the game: “I would hope our fans do what they always do, which is support our team in the best, most passionate way possible. I would hope they give every person in that stadium the respect they deserve, whether they are American, Mexican, neutral, men, women, children. I hope every person that comes to the stadium comes ready to enjoy what we all want to be a beautiful game between two sporting rivals that have a lot of respect for each other, and hope that it’s a special night in every way.”

It ended up being a more special night for Mexico, which won 2-1. Politics was a subtext of the match (I know of Mexican-Americans who usually root for the U.S. who couldn’t help but root for Mexico in post-electoral solidarity), but there were no chants about building a wall or mass deportations.

In January, the Phoenix Suns are playing regular-season NBA games against the Dallas Mavericks and San Antonio Spurs in Mexico City. Much like the NFL, with its estimated 20 million avid fans in Mexico and talk of a possible franchise there, the NBA doesn’t see America’s neighbor to the south as the poor, conniving disaster of a country depicted in the recent election. Instead, American pro basketball is treating Mexico as a venue for future growth: a dynamic market with an expanding middle class and an appetite for American goods, culture, and entertainment. As do the U.S. cities these NBA teams represent, all of whom are organizing events alongside the games to try to attract more Mexican investment, trade, and tourism.

Mexico is the second largest buyer of U.S. goods in the world, a market whose importance to most Fortune 500 companies cannot be overstated. These companies increasingly see North America as one integrated manufacturing platform too, a manufacturer that is more competitive with other parts of the world as a cohesive unit. Politicians bash companies like Ford for opening plants in Mexico, but 40 percent of the components of the goods imported from these plants are produced in the U.S., demonstrating how porous the border has become as an economic matter, and just how seamless the back-and-forth is within North American supply chains.

One underappreciated danger for both American and Mexican workers is that companies will be spooked by populist protectionism and take more of their global manufacturing out of North America altogether.

Back in the realm of sports diplomacy, one way for North Americans to transcend the ugliness of politics and assert a shared identity would be by hosting a World Cup together. The 2026 World Cup is the next one to be awarded, and the North American region is a strong contender, given the tournament’s traditional rotation among continents. Both Mexico and the U.S. are expected to submit compelling bids.

There has also been talk throughout the year of a potential joint U.S.-Mexico bid; World Cups are typically played in eight host cities, and there’s the precedent of Japan and South Korea sharing the 2002 Cup. But that talk was followed by speculation that Trump’s election makes a joint bid less likely.

It would be a shame to abandon the idea on account of politics. Quite the contrary: A shared North American World Cup (can we include Toronto too?) is needed, now more than ever.

The post Trump’s Border Wall Sidelined by Major League Sports appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From the perspective of us A-listers (sorry, couldn’t resist), that would amount to a classic case of the kind of “tyranny of the majority” our Founding Fathers were so eager to avoid, illustrating why certain filters, or brakes, on direct democracy are desirable. The idea was that people shouldn’t legislate themselves, but instead leave that up to their representatives.

And even if the people’s representatives get carried away, our political system has other checks and balances to insulate it from too much democracy: Congress itself is split into two bodies; unelected judges protect the Constitution from lawmakers; our nation’s monetary policy is set by an “independent” (undemocratic, that is) Federal Reserve Board. We’ve also developed a stable of technocratic agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to govern areas of American life at a dotted-line remove from the democratic process.

All these checks on democracy, together, constitute the genius of American democracy. We pride ourselves on our freedom to do as we damned please, but at the same time we’ve locked away all the chocolate and given the key to a friend, and warned him not to listen to us if we call to ask for it urgently late some night. Of course we then complain about how the system doesn’t work, about how we can’t binge on chocolate whenever we want.

Such complaints are the fuel of the term “populism.” The word wasn’t current in the era of the Founders, and it remains vaguely defined in ours, but it’s precisely what our republic’s designers were intent on protecting against: The danger that over-indulging majority passions could overwhelm and subvert the system at any given moment.

This is the election year of mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore populism (to cite the Howard Beale character from the classic Network movie), with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump railing against how bankers, Washington, the Federal Reserve, foreigners, and conspiring elites are holding back “the people.” Those are familiar rants, yet, there is something novel about the threat posed by today’s populism: The real threat nowadays is a potential tyranny of an agitated minority, more so than a potential tyranny of the majority.

The two dangers are easy to confuse because agitated minorities can look very much like a majority now that they can mobilize via once unimaginable communications technology and dominate wall-to-wall cable TV news coverage. Who knows how far William Jennings Bryan or Eugene V. Debs would have gotten with a Twitter following, a YouTube channel, and the ability to call into CNN?

Let’s tweak our imagined tax referendum to illustrate what a tyranny of the minority looks like. Suppose that instead of asking Americans whether people whose first name starts with an A should pay more taxes, we ask them to vote on whether A-listers should be exempted from ever again having to pay any taxes.

This measure, if uncoupled from any other balloting in a low-turnout vote, might conceivably pass. Why? Because we A-listers would turn out to vote in droves, and most everyone else would have little incentive to vote, or to speak out against the measure.

It’s an extreme hypothetical, but too much of American political life has become vulnerable to hijacking by intensely motivated and agitated minorities. It’s why teachers unions can control school board elections, why the gun lobby can punch above its weight in Washington, and why we haven’t fixed our broken immigration system.

The danger of not appreciating the threat posed by an extremely motivated minority, as opposed to an untrammeled majority, is that our society is enabling the former threat with its overzealous vigilance against the latter. So, for instance, while a bicameral Congress and the separation of powers that allots the executive a veto and the courts judicial review are good brakes on majority rule, the Senate’s filibuster rules and the so-called “Hastert Rule” observed by House Republicans go too far in empowering agitating minorities.

The Senate’s longtime filibuster rules were infamous in delaying the adoption of needed civil rights in the 20th century, long after a majority of Americans were ready to go along. This was a case of an aggrieved minority—white Southern Democrats—subverting the will of the majority to protect said minority.

The Hastert Rule in the House is a more recent, and less formalized, tradition in the House of Representatives that has similarly served to block immigration reform favored by a majority of Americans, and by a majority of their representatives in Congress. The policy, enunciated by Dennis Hastert when he was the Republican Speaker of the House (long before he was revealed to be a child molester), and loosely followed by some predecessors and successors, is that proposed legislation should not be brought for a vote on the floor of the House unless it is supported by a majority of the party’s own caucus.

As speaker in recent years, John Boehner set aside the rule at key times to allow for bipartisan votes to keep the government open when some far-right Republicans were threatening to close it down, and that’s one reason Mr. Boehner is no longer in office. But he did not allow the House to vote on a sensible immigration reform bill passed by the Senate in 2013, which would have legalized the status of the millions of undocumented workers in this country. The bill could have passed in the House with the support of Democrats and more moderate Republicans (as it did in the Senate), but the Hastert Rule stood in the way.

The Founding Fathers intended for both chambers of the Congress, as well as the president and the judiciary, to all wrestle with thorny issues like immigration—balancing the will of the people with the Constitution. It’s a perversion of their design for one faction within the House to hijack the process, and allow for an agitated minority of anti-immigration nativists to become the arbiters of what constitutes a proposal worth voting on.

Immigration and international trade feature prominently in this election cycle’s populist discourse, but it’s inaccurate to portray these issues, as the media often does, as pitting elites against “the people.” Opinion polls consistently show that a majority of Americans view trade in a positive light and favor immigration reform along the lines of what the Senate passed three years ago (as opposed to mass deportations and a wall). It’s easy to lose track of that reality, though, given the asymmetry of passion and interest between supporters and opponents of immigration and free trade.

Richard Nixon’s odes to the concept of a “silent majority,” whose support he cherished, were often mocked by pundits in his day but it’s a concept worth revisiting. Today there is a silent majority that thinks it’d be insane to deport millions of hard-working, law-abiding immigrant workers. But, like many other insane ideas out there, this one isn’t going to keep most people from going about their daily business. It’s the supporters of the insanity who likely consider immigration THE ISSUE of our times, and can be found screaming at rallies and pestering their members of Congress, threatening to have them “primaried” if they work with Democrats on the issue.

The dangers posed by agitated minorities are not merely an American phenomenon. They are wreaking greater havoc in other western democracies, like Colombia and Britain, that have ill-advisedly put big questions to a public vote in 2016. Elites in London and Bogotá were seeking additional legitimacy for their decisions to stay in the European Union and reach a final peace settlement with a vanquished narco-insurgency by engaging their silent majorities in the process. In the end, sizable impassioned minorities prevailed.

Trump’s populist campaign narrative of elites pitted against “the people” is off. Today’s politics is pitting elites and a silent (or quieter) majority against a loud, angry, mobilized faction of people susceptible to a populist pitch. The question on November 8 is whether the silent majority makes itself heard, or whether it will cede the electoral battleground to the more clamorous minority.

The post Thank Our Lucky Stars We Live in an Indirect Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was the early 1980s and Robert Massie had just published his riveting Peter the Great biography (I devoured it on a family cruise, which surprisingly didn’t impress the teenage girls onboard); Warren Beatty had produced his magisterial (super long) Reds; and the ABC TV network broadcast The Day After, a movie about a Soviet nuclear strike that millions of high schoolers across the land, myself included, were encouraged to come together to watch, and then discuss. Because, you know, that really could happen. And so, the adults wanted to know, how did that make us feel?

Well, it made me feel like this Russia, land of despotic czars, earthshattering revolutions and missiles targeted our way, was a pretty happening place. And that’s even before getting to what was on the nightly news. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and shot down a Korean airliner. President Reagan was calling them an evil empire and threatening to build a space-based anti-missile defense system in response to that movie we’d all seen on ABC. The Soviets were threatening to boycott our Olympics, as we had done theirs. The New York Times, meanwhile, spent a lot of newsprint trying to divine the intention of otherwise inscrutable Soviet leaders by their wardrobes. The nattier their suits, went the dubious logic, the greater the likelihood of a peaceful understanding between the two superpowers.

Back then, everything about Russia seemed massive, extreme and epic; contradictory and opaque. Russians had withstood centuries of unimaginable hardship to find themselves the improbable standard-bearers of a global cause that promised universal redemption, but delivered instead a rather grim version of purgatory on earth. Comrade, gulag, Siberia—single words dripping with vivid associations conveyed the price individual Russians had paid to preside collectively over one of two global power blocs: Team Red. The Russians had defeated Napoleon and Hitler; given humanity the gifts of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky; launched the first satellite in space; kicked ass at every Olympics (now we know how); and obsessed weirdly over ballet and chess.

So naturally I said “sign me up” when I had an opportunity to visit the Soviet Union for two weeks while still in high school, as part of a cultural exchange. It was a trippy voyage to an alternative reality. With any genuine revolutionary zeal long extinguished by decades of living under the soul-crushing dictatorship of the proletariat, Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk—their inherent March grayness still festooned with exhortative propaganda banners—felt like a kitschy totalitarian amusement park. Almost. There was nothing faded or fake about the palpable fear of ordinary Russians you’d meet with late at night under the statue of Yuri Gagarin to trade a Sony Walkman or jeans for KGB Border Guard hats or coats.

College deepened the seduction. I was completely in awe of the troika of Yale historians who brought the Soviets’ dramatic backstory to life: Firuz Kazemzadeh, who spiced his telling of the Romanovs’ three-century-long soap opera with vivid imagery of the empire’s Caucasian borderlands; Paul Bushkovitch, who handed out shots of vodka on Lenin’s birthday at our Russian Revolution seminar; and the ever-theatrical Wolfgang Leonhard, the former East German communist intellectual raised in Moscow who had turned on the DDR regime he had helped consolidate in its earliest days. As if the history weren’t enough, there was the brilliant literature and the challenging language, with all those declensions and the funky blending of those sh, ch and jr sounds, and the elongated mix of vowel sounds playing like a string quartet.

Best of all, none of this intoxicating immersion in all things Russian could be dismissed as an esoteric indulgence. Russia mattered; understanding Russia mattered. Couldn’t you see the breathless coverage those Reagan-Gorbachev summits were getting on TV? Know your enemy, and all that. It’s the same reason I see many young ambitious people nowadays rushing to study Arabic. It’s patriotic, career savvy, and intellectually satisfying, given the richness of the underlying culture.
 

***

 
Now don’t get me wrong. No other power has since replaced the USSR as a proper antithesis to the United States. China is a potent commercial competitor and a wary rival for influence in Asia, but its reach and ambitions aren’t expansive enough to turn the entire globe into a bipolar zero-sum face-off, as the Soviets once did. And more immediate threats loom elsewhere, across a series of smaller countries and terrorist groups.

The undeniable nostalgia for the Cold War in American culture is a hard thing to fathom, and it is one of the animating mysteries behind this week’s Inquiry at Zócalo. That confrontation came with a heavy price for Americans, and an even heavier price for people in many parts of the world who were treated as pawns in the two superpowers’ global chess match. And to the extent that after so much sacrifice and effort we’d already “won” it (a regrettable attitude that has gotten in the way of a more constructive relationship with Russia), why would Americans want to go back to the Cold War?

Let’s face it, the alternative to a Cold War with the Russians, has proven less appetizing than we might have expected. It’s not easy being the sole “hyperpower” responsible for all things. And the Soviets were formidable in a way that our more amorphous all-out enemies today—a shifting amalgam of unstable regimes and loosely affiliated transnational terrorist groups—can never be. Extremist Islamist groups aren’t competing head-to-head with our best and brightest to explore space, to cure cancer, to win over hearts and minds in Western Europe, East Asia, and Latin America, or to win Olympic gold.

And yet today’s less worthy opponents are more dangerous because they lack a superpower’s rationality and investment in a bipolar status quo. In our age of asymmetrical warfare and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, you don’t need a Russian-sized nuclear arsenal to pose an imminent threat to our way of life. No enemy we face again will likely have at its disposal the destructive force the Soviets could command, but plenty of enemies we face today and will face in the future are far more likely to unleash whatever destructive force they can muster. There was much to abhor about our Soviet nemesis during the Cold War, but deep down, its leaders never wanted us all dead.

With the Russians, you always felt that if aliens from another galaxy attacked earth, the American president could pick up his red phone and get Moscow to set aside their differences with us and join forces on Team Humanity. When it comes to the likes of ISIS, good luck with that.
 

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The Russian-American rivalry has been playing itself out for one year shy of a century. It was in 1917 that both gigantic nations burst onto the global stage to offer a war-weary world competing visions of an alternative tomorrow. Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin appeared on the destroyed imperial scene as messianic figures, one peddling the possibility of national self-determination to all peoples through his Fourteen Points, the other carrying the torch for the international proletarian revolution that would render nationalism, and social classes, obsolete.

With all its flaws and heinous behavior, the USSR, much like the United States and contrary to most other modern nation-states, was predicated on a universal ideal that people anywhere could rally around. The Soviets’ project was also— again, despite its flaws—a forward-looking one, unlike those of our current enemies who desperately want to turn back the clock.

The formal demise of the USSR in 1991 ostensibly ended the Cold War, and historians will long debate the extent to which the ensuing few years constituted a missed opportunity on Washington’s part to recast U.S.-Russian relations on far friendlier ground. But whether you believe the fault lies primarily with our missteps or inevitable Russian yearnings to remain an antithesis to the West, the fact is that the Cold War antagonism is back.

That’s both maddening and comforting. Russia is less of a global player than the Soviet Union, more of a “normal country,” and it must now share the other end of the proverbial seesaw from us with other U.S. antagonists. So the stakes may not be quite as high, but Vladimir Putin is doing his darnedest to play the part.

The Russians are back, in time to mess with our presidential election, both as a befuddling topic and a devious protagonist. It’s hard to imagine a more Cold War-ish form of belligerence than cyber warfare, and the hacking of our electoral process and of our leaders’ private communications, with an eye towards their public dissemination. Such attacks are a sophisticated technical challenge, no one gets physically hurt, but the mere possibility of these hacks wreak havoc on our nerves, and incite waves of insecurity and paranoia, as well as calls for retaliation and escalation.

The seductive chess match is back on.

The post I Could Blame Peter the Great or Warren Beatty, But Either Way The Soviets Got to Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rushmore is a movie crammed with many great moments, but this exchange between the middle-aged business tycoon Herman Blume (Bill Murray) and the precocious Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) establishes the emotional connection around which the darkly inspiring comedy revolves.

I remember being transfixed by Wes Anderson’s film when I first saw it in a theatre in early 1999, and have found it equally rewarding in the dozen or so times I have watched it since. Rushmore manages to be funny, wistful, smart, dark, poignant, and irreverent without ever being cynical—a rare feat in our culture.

Still, some people through the years have looked at me askance when I pronounce Rushmore, without hesitation, as my favorite movie. You know, that look that asks, “What does that say about you?” I don’t imagine Rushmore is on the list of movies political consultants advise clients to mention as their favorite movies.

So what does it say about me? The question makes me uncomfortable, to the point where I start wishing I could change my answer to Casablanca or Star Wars. Or maybe I could simply deflect, by asking, as Max does in an early scene with his headmaster Dr. Guggenheim, “Couldn’t we just let me float by? For old time’s sake?”

During my most recent viewing of Rushmore, I was struck (probably because I was sharing it with my son for the first time) at how painfully awkward and unsettling some scenes can be. You wince, or want to look away, when the 15-year-old Max is putting the moves on Rosemary Cross, the school’s beautiful first grade teacher, an English widow whose husband had attended the school. Or when he holds an unauthorized ribbon-cutting ceremony for an unauthorized aquarium he wants to build in her honor. Or when he insults Cross’s date to the play he’s put on, or lies to Blume about his father, a barber, being a brain surgeon.

Max is a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who lost his mom when he was too young. But he got a scholarship to the rich kids’ school because he wrote a “little one-act play” about Watergate in the second grade that convinced his mom, shortly before she passed away, that her son should attend Rushmore Academy. Now Max is on the verge of flunking out—not because he is uninterested in school, but rather because he is the school’s heart and soul, the epicenter of every extracurricular imaginable, with little time for his studies.

High school movies will always be a cinematic gold mine because those teenage years are such a wrenching wasteland—an exile from both childhood and adulthood—to which everyone can relate. What differentiates Rushmore is how the Max-Blume-Cross relationship transcends generations. Even excellent high school movies that capture the intricacies of teenage culture can struggle to establish any nuanced relationship between the teenagers and the rest of society. Adults often come across as stick figures, lacking in understanding. The conceit is that we adults in the audience have a better connection with the on-screen teenagers than the on-screen adults do.

Despite being named after the school, Rushmore breaks these teenagers out of their cage and connects them to the rest of us. Bill Murray as Blume, a rich businessman trapped in a soulless life, gets a kick out of Fischer from their very first encounter, no doubt envying the teenager’s idealism, enthusiasm, and even his nerdy goofiness. Blume sees some of his eroded self there, and wants some of that spark. It’s the adult asking the kid, after all, what’s the secret to life, not the other way around. Meanwhile Max admires Blume’s independence. And they both see in Cross the possibility of redemption, by saving her from her sadness. These are all estranged characters, exiles who recognize each other as such and embrace their unexpected bond.

Even among the adults, the irrepressible Max takes the lead. Blume arrives at Cross’s doorstep in one brilliantly understated scene to awkwardly admit that he can’t remember whether Max had organized anything for them that day. And in what’s probably my favorite scene of all (that is a tough, shifting, call), Max asks to speak to his new classmates at Grover Cleveland High, the public school to which he is exiled upon expulsion from Rushmore, and tells them that he looks forward to contributing to the school, noting that he is aware it doesn’t have a fencing team, but that he will work on it. Another exile in her own right, Margaret Yang, comes up to him after class to say, “I liked your speech.” And, more to the point, “I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone ever asking to give a speech in class before.”

We can all relate to some threads in Rushmore. I came to the United States from Mexico to go to a prestigious boarding school when I was Max’s age, and struggled at first to adapt to a new culture, and new expectations. I was always eager to grow up, to move on, which invariably meant having some crushes on inappropriately older women. Most of us don’t act on these impulses, but the yearning is clearly there, to be identified with by people you admire, who aren’t necessarily your age. In middle school I had a younger friend, a guy two grades below me, because he happened to be the only other kid in our school rooting for the same professional soccer team I did. Age, as Rushmore makes clear, shouldn’t be the only basis for a bond, for identifying ourselves in another.

The director, Wes Anderson, takes us on quite a ride (I am not as enthusiastic about his subsequent movies, in which he at times succumbs to his gift for set pieces at the expense of fluid storytelling)—an often uncomfortable ride, like teenage-hood itself, but one that ends in redemption. In his own neurotic, but ultimately generous, way, Max makes things right for all around him.

As Ms. Cross, impressed, tells him: “Well, you pulled it off.”
“It went ok. At least nobody got hurt,” Max responds.
“Except for you.”
“Nah, I didn’t get hurt that bad.”

But some. That’s what being an exile from both childhood and adulthood is all about.

The post He Saved Latin, What Did You Ever Do? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The last decade of the previous millennium is suddenly all the rage, claiming a growing slice of our cultural mindshare. Monica Lewinsky is on the speaking circuit. American cable networks have served up series based on the O.J. Simpson trial and Anita Hill confirmation hearings, as well as remakes of everything from Twin Peaks to the X-Files. And, as we contemplate sending the Clintons back to the White House, the ’90s are framing many of the policy debates underlying this year’s presidential election. Clinton-era economic globalization, anti-crime efforts, welfare reform, and financial deregulation are all on trial this election year.

Nostalgia for the ’90s is triggered by plenty of contemporary prompts, but the trend is also a matter of generational scheduling. We’ve acquired the requisite amount of distance from the decade to allow it to come into focus as a distinct, coherent period of time, the way the 1980s came into focus for us in the last 15 or so years, and the way the “aughts” will in another decade or so. In addition, the children of the ‘90s are now coming into their own as cultural gatekeepers in movie studios and media, able to indulge in and share their personal nostalgia.

More than anything, the ’90s in retrospect were an exuberant interlude between the Cold War and the post-Sept. 11 era. Hardly anyone would dispute that. The debate is over whether you think we wasted this exuberant interlude by indulging in mindless pursuits of no lasting impact, or whether the decade stands, as Bill Clinton asserts, as a consequential time of sound governance, impressive innovation, expanding opportunity, and prosperity.

I am with Clinton in this debate, but it isn’t hard to see the appeal of the counterargument that this was a decade—as Seinfeld, the iconic TV sitcom of the ’90s referred to itself— “about nothing.” The notion is that American society, liberated from the decades-long nuclear standoff with the Soviets, was allowed to exhale, and focus on frivolity. Even in the political realm, the Inquisition of Clinton for his sexual peccadillos (or the peccadillos themselves, if you insist) can be interpreted as an admission that this was a new era of lowered stakes, when politics wasn’t constrained by the exigencies of confronting existential threats.

As a society, we struggled in the ’90s to assess risk, and this was as true in foreign policy as it was in the business world and in politics. The decade that started with much angst about declining American economic power (remember the odd popularity of Paul Kennedy’s history tome on the decline of great powers and worries about how Japan was taking over?) and a stubborn recession would end with strong economic growth and soaring financial markets amidst what then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.”

In foreign policy, the end of the Cold War allowed America to consolidate our capitalist model as the default for the international order. It also made policymakers far more tactical and opportunistic about weighing the costs and benefits of engaging American military power around the world, especially since we were no longer in a global contest with the Soviet Union. We oscillated between being enamored of our sole superpower status and being mindful of our historic reluctance to play global policeman. We were stunned at how easy it was to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army in the first Gulf War, but then chastened by the loss of 18 soldiers in a task force under the Joint Special Operations Command in Somalia. Soon thereafter, we tragically stood by as genocide took place in Rwanda. Later in the decade, somewhat belatedly, we led NATO to destroy ethnic Serbian militarism in the Balkans, but allowed looming threats from non-state terrorist actors to fester elsewhere, like Afghanistan, with fatal consequences in the 2000s. When it came to national security, it was the case-by-case decade.

However, the sense that we were no longer stuck in a divided, zero-sum world proved enormously beneficial for cross-border collaboration and economic expansion around the world. The Europeans transformed their common market into a full-blown union, with a shared currency; closer to home, the North American Free Trade Area was born; in Asia, the world’s most populous nation became more integrated into the global economy; and a loose set of governing trading rules became the World Trade Organization.

With nationalism resurgent in 2016, and even well meaning First World elites fetishizing locally sourced everything, I miss the spirit of those days: the recognition that we are all in this together, and the ambition to raise living standards around the world.

Globalization and technology exacerbated inequality within many countries over time. But it’s less often acknowledged that the single most important economic story of the past two decades is the unprecedented decline in dire poverty around the world, and the expansion of a global middle class. Many of the institutions and approaches from the ’90s may be under siege in today’s political climate, but their legacy continues to be impressive.

On the domestic front, too, the ’90s were the opposite of a wasted decade. The U.S. economy registered its longest economic expansion ever, from March 1991 to March 2001, creating nearly 25 million jobs in the period. Americans enjoyed rising wages, low inflation, and accelerating productivity growth, thus almost forgetting about economic cycles and the concept of risk. Uncle Sam benefited from the good times, as government deficits gave way to healthy surpluses. The financial exuberance around the internet’s adoption proved to be irrational in the end, with all the buzzy talk about a “new economy,” but the hype around the transformative power of the new technologies was well deserved.

For Americans living in cities, the decade saw a vast improvement in our physical surroundings as well. I lived in New York in 1990, then mired in the fearful mood captured in Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel. When I returned near the end of the decade after a stint away, I found Manhattanites as likely to be worried about the Disneyfication of their city as they were about their personal safety. Violent crime in New York declined by more than half in the 1990s, and public spaces throughout the city were reclaimed for public enjoyment. The same was true in cities across the country.

It’s as reasonable to second-guess the decade’s bipartisan anti-crime legislation and strategies as it is to second-guess our embrace of globalization in those years. But the conversation should start with a recognition of how much things improved. Pretending the 1990s were a wasteland of frivolity is a recipe for losing sight of that exuberant decade’s bountiful, lasting legacies.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly referred to the 18 Americans who died in Somalia as Marines. They were Army soldiers in a task force assembled from several branches of the military.

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Plus, I’m distracted by what seems a more pressing matter: my fast-approaching half-century mark.

Yes, I will soon turn the big 5-0. And the thing is, I’ve been struggling with how to commemorate the occasion, or really, what it means. My doctor pointed out it means it’s time for a colonoscopy, but I am yearning for more.

So I have decided to think of this milestone as halftime in the big game of life (I know, I know, that’s optimistic, but go with it), though I am still a bit sketchy on what the intermission itself should entail. No big act has been lined up (I’d settle for Coldplay without Beyoncé); no inspirational coach is ready to chew me out for the numerous screw-ups in the first half and to point out how I can do better in the second. I want to catch my breath, recharge my batteries, and strategize for what lies ahead.

These big milestones, of course, don’t happen to us in a vacuum. They are forceful because you witness all those around you—siblings, friends, work colleagues—go through them as well, many of them before you do. I’ve looked to my peers for cues on what to do when I turn 50. I am impressed and alarmed that many in my cohort seem to take their 50th birthday in stride, either shrugging off its significance or celebrating it with unabashed good cheer—going off to Vegas, or a dream golf vacation, or letting friends throw them an epic “surprise” party.

I don’t begrudge them their celebrations, but what I am truly jealous of is their apparent lack of need for a more contemplative halftime that blends some tough self-criticism with inspiration. Maybe it’s because these people are well adjusted and don’t need a course correction, an assessment of where they are or a pep talk. Maybe the point is that by the age of 50 you’re supposed to have figured it all out, and I am just behind the curve.

It’s hard to establish tidy milestones for the elastic middle part of our lives. Early on, life is organized around such occasions, formal graduations from each level of schooling with rituals that bake in instant nostalgia for the immediate past with soaring exhortations about what comes next.

And then we’re off to the races, facing a vast blank slate stretching into the far-off distance, where a fuzzy finish line can barely be discerned, with its nebulous concept of retirement offering the next concrete commemoration of where you are in life.

I exaggerate, to be sure, when you consider that getting married and having kids are obviously huge life milestones, and that depending on your chosen career, you may have plenty of discernible watershed moments to celebrate in your profession. But as consequential as getting married, becoming a parent, or reaching one’s professional goals can be, these are commemorations of those specific events, that we only rely on loosely, and often inappropriately, as proxies for where we are supposed to be in life.

They also happen (or should happen) on their own timing—they don’t fill my perceived need for a more universally observed halftime ritual.

Sadly, while plenty of people joyously celebrate their 40th and 50th birthdays, our cultural associations with “midlife” tend to be negative. Indeed, when I write “midlife,” you think “crisis.” Why can’t “midlife” be associated with “celebration” or “break” or “appraisal?” The Super Bowl puts on a big party at halftime, not a collective freakout, so why can’t we?

It’s no wonder study after study shows that people are happiest in their younger and older years; our culture has a harder time with the middle part.

The lack of a formalized pit stop in that vast blank slate of the middle part of life, an occasion to reflect on the lessons learned in the first half and gear up for a second one full of purpose and growth, feeds our anxiety about where we stand, and often leads to a sense of reckless denial.

Most of us do need a halftime reckoning. We’ve had our share of triumphs and disappointments, and we’re struggling to come to terms with the fact that certain opportunities may have passed us by already. Suddenly presidents are our age or younger, our kids are becoming more self-sufficient, and our knees keep reminding us that we’re not early in the game. But we’ve also figured a few things out, about ourselves and about the world, and if you give us a moment to think about it, we can set new goals and get psyched about what lies ahead.

Perhaps if I did some research I’d find that some Scandinavian country—it’s always some Scandinavian country—has figured out the properly enlightened find-yourself halftime ritual, and enshrined it as a lavish social entitlement. And no doubt there are certain workplaces that generously encourage sabbaticals, or even midlife gap years.

But I don’t think halftime has to be unrealistically complicated, or necessarily life-altering. I am looking for rites of passage that can be universal. Maybe it’s a voyage that you could pay for with tax-preferred retirement funds. Or some form of community service. Or simply a soulful observance like a religion’s confirmation ritual. Or maybe it’s about doing the one thing you’d never thought you’d do, or about writing your own life evaluation and sharing it with a confidant or mentor, who’d give you feedback, like a coach.

Our halftime breaks shouldn’t be pegged at the same age for everyone; it should be something you declare and observe once, on whichever birthday feels right, whether it’s your 35th or your 55th. I’m declaring it on my 50th, not because I expect to live to be 100, but because I can roughly call this the halftime of my post-school productive years. That’s reassuring, insofar as it buys me time to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, as opposed to gunning for an early retirement.

And if I do make it to my late retirement, at least the rituals and commemorations associated with the occasion will be a lot clearer.

The post When I Say ‘Midlife,’ Don’t Think ‘Crisis’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The power of sports fandom can at times seem irrational, especially to those who, blessed with an immunity to this potent virus, can utter those devastatingly inhumane words: “It’s just a game.” As the novelist Nick Hornby wrote in the opening of Fever Pitch, his wonderful memoir of growing up an Arsenal fan in England: “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”

Sitting in a Phoenix sports bar watching the Carolina Panthers utterly dismantle the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship Game, I witnessed this pain of which Hornby spoke, and which I had felt in my core the previous week when the Denver Broncos knocked my Steelers out of the playoffs. The atmosphere in the bar went from celebratory to funereal over the span of two quarters. By the end, we were at a wake, talking in hushed tones, awkwardly reaching for some reassuring words of consolation for each other.

“Well, they had a good season” sounded a lot like the variants of that line you often hear at funerals: “He led such a full life.” At least no one said: “It’s only a game.”

So why the depth of passion among so many sports fans? Part of it, to be sure, is our appreciation and love for the sport being followed, and that sport’s central role in the sliver of our lives we can devote to leisure and entertainment. But I think that is only the tip of sports fandom’s iceberg.

The depth of our passion and commitment as sports fans comes from our sense of identity, how we connect to our past selves, and how we remain connected to the meaningful places in our lives, and to the people around us. Sports fandom, like religion, is fueled by nostalgia and a yearning for permanence in a world that is inherently impermanent.

Which is what makes the disappearance of Atlético Español so traumatic for me—the fatal version of the disruption alluded to by Hornby, alongside the pain. When I tune into Liga MX and see so many of the other teams Atlético used to play against still around, it’s as if I’ve been edited out of a picture I thought I was in, as if the moorings tying me to my childhood in Mexico have been irreversibly cut.

Back in America’s version of football, many people are stunned that, after a deluge of scandals in the last couple of years (brain injuries, star players involved in off-field crimes, allegations of cheating, franchise owners eager to bilk cities for sweetheart stadium deals), the NFL’s ratings continue to spike. Ratings for this past regular season and playoffs are up from a year ago, at a time when audiences for almost everything else keep fragmenting.

When NBC launched Sunday Night Football in 2006, the telecast ranked ninth in primetime ratings for the season. Ever since 2011, Sunday Night Football has been the undisputed primetime leader. A remarkable 14 of the 15 most watched TV shows last fall were football games, and the six highest-rated broadcasts of all times are Super Bowls (the M.A.S.H. 1983 finale is clinging to the seventh spot).

The NFL has done a brilliant job of leveraging fans’ nostalgia and desire to remain identified with the places they’ve moved away from. Hence the need to keep franchises in places like Green Bay and Buffalo, even if many of their fans cheer them on in warmer climates, and for a business model that makes all franchises competitive.

Parity means most teams will have moments of glory, enough to deepen an entire generation’s engagement with their ancestral NFL tribe. But the league puts its long-term success at risk when it lets teams move around for short-term gain, as it recently did when it allowed the Rams to leave St. Louis for Los Angeles.

We live in an age when we share fewer narrative threads in common, and when fewer narrative threads endure throughout our lives. Holidays help, including the upcoming observance of Super Bowl 50. I remember my mother in her later years turning on the NFL on Sundays to have games on in the background, because she liked to hear “the sounds of fall,” or because it connected her to her son if the Steelers were playing, or to her beloved Boston if it was the Patriots.

The Star Wars cultural phenomenon springs from a similar nostalgia and yearning for recurring shared narratives in an age of impermanence. Its fandom feels sports-like. I took my 11 year-old son to see The Force Awakens on opening weekend, with a lump in my throat at the realization that he is the exact age I was back when the first (or fourth, if you insist) Star Wars came out. Naysayers who complained that the plot of the new film too closely mimics the original Star Wars completely miss the franchise’s appeal. I don’t begrudge successful Steeler seasons because I have seen them before; I thrill at quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and wide receiver Antonio Brown following in the footsteps of Steeler greats Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann. And so it is with Rey’s journey echoing Luke Skywalker’s.

We all yearn to tap into these stories and memories that have defined us. As the Red Sox-obsessed protagonist in the Hollywood adaptation of Fever Pitch, played by Jimmy Fallon, asks his less-devoted-to-Fenway girlfriend:

Do you still care about anything you cared about years ago?

The post Why We Let Sports Teams Break Our Hearts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Forget all that talk about the wisdom of voters, and the great American people. We are the problem, with our shrill, hyperbolic, extremist, intolerant, and polarized ways of engaging in politics over the past two decades.

I can recall in the late ’90s being totally befuddled by how some of my friends, perfectly sensible people when the subject wasn’t politics, would go apoplectic at the mere mention of Bill Clinton.

Our president, I can recall a Michigan banker friend named John telling me, was a socialist, a dishonorable man intent on destroying America. John would practically start shaking when discussing Clinton and the need for the cretin to be removed from office. I couldn’t understand where all this vitriol came from. To what water cooler did he retreat to where such views were the norm? (A clue: I think it was from him that I first heard of Fox News).

Sure, Clinton had his personal weaknesses (almost clichés for a politico, though, which in other eras would not likely have led to impeachment proceedings). But as far as I could see, the president was overseeing a massive economic boom (deregulating John’s banking industry along the way), taking on Democratic unions to push for free trade agreements, balancing the federal budget, and deploying U.S. forces overseas, when required, in places like Kosovo and Iraq. How did all that make Bill Clinton a crazed socialist?

I was equally perplexed by the irrational level of contempt and vitriol leftist friends and colleagues felt towards George W. Bush late in his first term, and throughout his second term. The man was a fascist, they’d say, amid wishful talk of impeachment. I, too, disagreed with much of what Bush did, and worried about that administration’s competence, but the criticism among impassioned liberals, congregating online at a new crop of progressive websites and watching MSNBC and Jon Stewart, was absurdly over the top.

The facts, once again, were becoming awfully elastic and selectively parsed. Take the war in Iraq. Within a couple of years of the 2003 invasion, Democrats talked about the war as a secretive, despicable Bush plot. Never mind that plenty of Democrats supported the initial decision to go to war, and that there had been little daylight between the Clinton national security team’s assessment of Saddam Hussein’s behavior, capabilities, and intentions, and the assessment of the Bush team.

What was becoming clear, however, is that we Americans—specifically the more politically engaged among us—have been losing our ability to respectfully and constructively disagree with governing leaders of a different party, not to mention with each other. Instead of opposing certain policies of a president we don’t see eye to eye with, we jump to questioning that president’s legitimacy to even hold the office, to represent us.

Of course, this psychosis has been most pronounced during President Barack Obama’s administration, when plenty of Republicans have repeatedly questioned the president’s birthplace and religion. And, once again, the extremist rhetoric portraying him as a feckless socialist seems far removed from facts, when you consider how he responded to the financial crisis by shoring up banking institutions without taking them over, embraced a moderate market-based approach to healthcare reform (instead of a single-payer approach), and ratcheted up the drone campaigns against terrorists in countries like Yemen and Pakistan. There’s plenty to disagree with Obama on, and I understand conservatives’ ire at Obamacare and some of his progressive social agenda. But isn’t there a way to oppose the president without ridiculing the man, questioning his patriotism, and denying his legitimacy as a twice-elected leader of the free world?

The anecdotal sense that we have become a far more polarized society was borne out last year by the largest political survey ever conducted by the Pew Research Center. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history; that the two parties no longer overlapped in any meaningful way; that, in 20 years, the share of Americans expressing consistently across-the-board conservative or liberal positions had doubled, as had the percentage of Republicans and Democrats holding “very unfavorable” views of the other party. The study also found that more and more of us are hiding out in our hardened ideological silos, increasingly segregated from fellow citizens and media that don’t share our worldview. And by worldview, we no longer seem to be talking solely about one’s interpretation of objective facts, but one’s subjective choice of facts.

My list of causes for this would include the end of the Cold War (the daily threat of nuclear extinction didn’t allow for self-destructive partisanship); the balkanization of media, aided by the advent of the Internet; the takeover of politics by the fundraising-industrial complex (it’s much easier to raise money if you’re screaming that you’re fighting a danger to the republic rather than a well-meaning, if misguided, friend from the other side of the aisle); and the poisoning of the idea that Washington is a permanent home where our representatives should live, mingle, and learn to get along.

Choose your favorite polarizing culprits from that list, or add others to it, but there is no denying that we’ve landed at an ugly moment on the eve of the 2016 vote. Recent primaries have featured early “silly seasons” when voters have flirted with absurd candidacies before sobering up. But now the silly season is threatening to spill over into the actual voting process.

Let’s stipulate the obvious: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are beyond the pale. In a more serious time, they never would have been considered credible candidates in a national election. Only in silos of same-thinking dogmatism is this not obvious. Trump, in particular, has masterfully capitalized on the cultural moment, turning into a fascist demagogue before our eyes, exhorting people to channel their anger with the status quo and “Make America Great Again” by bullying foreigners and minorities, those “others” who are to blame for all our woes. His candidacy embodies and fulfills the hysterical tenor of our political discourse. He is our political Frankenstein. If we elect Donald Trump president, half the country’s cries that our president is a fascist unfit for office will—for once—be no exaggeration.

The Republicans don’t have a monopoly on a lack of seriousness. Sanders is not leading in the polls, but the fact that so many Democrats treat him as a legitimate choice is alarming. When the self-avowed Socialist (again, real life is catching up with our once exaggerated epithets) was asked in a recent debate how high he’d like to raise income tax rates if elected, he vaguely joked that they wouldn’t go higher than 90 percent. Hillary Clinton is in a different league, credibility-wise, but our debased political culture is forcing her into some intellectually dishonest contortions. So, for instance, she had to come out against President Obama’s Asian trade pact (which she championed and negotiated as Secretary of State) because the “base” these days won’t tolerate any deviance from its dogma or overlap between the parties. It all boils down to “us” versus “them.”

There is that old aphorism (often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but of uncertain origins) that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. We must have a reckoning with ourselves, as voters and citizens. It’s great fun to sit back and mock, or demonize, these presidential candidates, but they aren’t the underlying problem. We are.

The post Don’t Blame The Candidates—Blame Yourself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No? What are you waiting for? Labor Day is upon us.

September sneaks up on us every year to interrupt the languid days of summer, like a bell being rung to signal the end of recess, a return to work and to seriousness. ’Tis the season to be purposeful.

September is the first month of the rest of our lives. The day after Labor Day should be proclaimed our real New Year’s Day. So what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Or at least with the coming year? At least go out and buy yourself one of the many calendars or planners that starts with the fall—believe me, it isn’t just students purchasing them.

We talk about the “school year” starting now, but I am not sure why the qualifier, why the undue deference to January. Nothing ever really starts in January, a dreary post-holiday hangover of a month. It’s no wonder that month’s resolutions usually fail to gain any traction.

I was reminded of how hardwired we all are to think and act in terms of academic years while enviously watching my fifth-grader unpack his new supplies the other day at his school’s open house. All those new pencils, pristine notebooks, and binders ready to entertain new scribbles and doodles. I’ll never forget that excitement of getting new notebooks each fall, writing my name on them, and struggling to keep the starched paper from sticking together initially.

In college, I used to love picking up the books for each course (well, except for the moment I had to pay for them) and I’d make the most of our initial “shopping period,” when you could wander in and out of any class, as if sampling a grand buffet, before finalizing your semester schedule. The possibilities were endless.

But fall isn’t only about going back to school. Every workplace I have ever worked at has treated the fall as the true beginning of the year, when new projects are launched. Fall marks the start of a new football season (both of the American and English varieties), a new TV season, and a new budgetary year for the federal government. It marks the arrival of new fashions (check out how fat those magazines are!), new car models, and of more purposeful movies and weather. In certain latitudes, the fall brings a crisp air that chides you into reaching out for your long-neglected sweater or jacket—but without the malevolence of winter.

In September, I still believe, every year, that my Steelers and Gunners will go all the way in their respective leagues. Even Cleveland Browns and Tottenham Hotspurs fans can be hopeful in September. Heck, even those teams’ players can be hopeful this time of year, at least for a few weeks.

This new year I am also excited to check out Stephen Colbert’s debut playing himself on late-night network TV, and the return of the Muppets to primetime. Don’t bother asking me what’s new, what I am excited about, come January. I couldn’t tell you.

Could the NFL, Hollywood, Uncle Sam, and Judaism all be wrong about the true beginning of the year? I don’t think so.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year (“head of the year”), commemorates God’s annual renewal of the world; this year it starts at sundown on September 13. Most Christian denominations used to set the beginning of their liturgical year in September as well; the Eastern Orthodox still do. Back in their heyday, the Phoenicians and Persians were also civilized enough to realize New Year should be celebrated in the fall.

The theme of renewal is why it’s important to celebrate the arrival of a new year on a personal level, by taking stock, and by setting new goals and resolutions. I can’t guarantee you will succeed in shedding all those pounds, learning Arabic, and becoming your community’s leading volunteer—all the while increasing your productivity at work.

The important thing is to try, whatever your resolution may be. Then try again.

And to start your trying now, not in January.

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